Hello,

I am helping write a GUI APT frontend and we wanted to add proper conffile support, preferably be providing our own GUI alert with the
possible actions. I had realized that the best way to do that would be
to add an option to DPKG that allows a custom program to be specified to
be used instead of the default prompt when replacing conffiles. In src/configure.c, the function deferred_configure_conffiles() calls promptconfaction(). promptconfaction() runs the function show_prompt()
and parses the result. My patch will modify promptconfaction() to
execute an external program and parse the result of that instead of the show_prompt() function. However before I started writing anything I
wanted to know if this is something that could be upstreamed, and if you
have any ways to improve this idea.

Thank you,
Cameron Katri

--
Cameron Katri
Email: me@cameronkatri.com
PGP Fingerprint: 7D3B36CEA40FCC2181FB6DCDBAFFD97826540F1C

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

[ Sorry, resending, missed to actually Cc Colin! I don't currently have
my head where it should be. :/ ]

On Sun, 2022-04-10 at 10:52:56 +0200, Guillem Jover wrote:

Hi!

On Sun, 2022-04-03 at 22:29:42 -0400, Cameron Katri wrote:

I am helping write a GUI APT frontend and we wanted to add proper conffile
support, preferably be providing our own GUI alert with the possible actions. I had realized that the best way to do that would be to add an option to DPKG that allows a custom program to be specified to be used instead of the default prompt when replacing conffiles. In src/configure.c, the function deferred_configure_conffiles() calls promptconfaction(). promptconfaction() runs the function show_prompt() and parses the result. My
patch will modify promptconfaction() to execute an external program and parse the result of that instead of the show_prompt() function. However before I started writing anything I wanted to know if this is something that
could be upstreamed, and if you have any ways to improve this idea.

The long-time plan has been to add debconf(7) support to dpkg. There's
a very early draft (probably missing structure and much detail) at <https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Dpkg/Spec/DebconfIntegration>, but
AFAIR there are several things that would need changes first from the
debconf side to be able to integrate this properly, which has seemed
like a non-trivial endeavor. I think we have had some brief discussions
about it in the past (might have been face to face) with Colin Watson
(CCed, current maintainer) and Joey Hess (a previous maintainer), but
I'm afraid we never got to do much with it, or write a concrete plan
about it.

There was a PoC by Sean Finney, adding debconf support long time ago,
but that did not cover much of the above. This can be found at:

<https://git.hadrons.org/cgit/debian/dpkg/dpkg.git/log/?h=ext/sean-debconf-prompt>

I'm wondering though, whether you might be able to use dpkg's
--status-fd (which can be specified multiple times, even if apt passes
its own), where you'd get the prompt stuff via a structured output
that you could parse instead? This would have the advantage of being
readily usable right away.

Thanks,
Guillem

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

Hi!

On Sun, 2022-04-03 at 22:29:42 -0400, Cameron Katri wrote:

I am helping write a GUI APT frontend and we wanted to add proper conffile
support, preferably be providing our own GUI alert with the possible
actions. I had realized that the best way to do that would be to add an option to DPKG that allows a custom program to be specified to be used instead of the default prompt when replacing conffiles. In src/configure.c, the function deferred_configure_conffiles() calls promptconfaction(). promptconfaction() runs the function show_prompt() and parses the result. My patch will modify promptconfaction() to execute an external program and
parse the result of that instead of the show_prompt() function. However before I started writing anything I wanted to know if this is something that could be upstreamed, and if you have any ways to improve this idea.

The long-time plan has been to add debconf(7) support to dpkg. There's
a very early draft (probably missing structure and much detail) at <https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Dpkg/Spec/DebconfIntegration>, but
AFAIR there are several things that would need changes first from the
debconf side to be able to integrate this properly, which has seemed
like a non-trivial endeavor. I think we have had some brief discussions
about it in the past (might have been face to face) with Colin Watson
(CCed, current maintainer) and Joey Hess (a previous maintainer), but
I'm afraid we never got to do much with it, or write a concrete plan
about it.

There was a PoC by Sean Finney, adding debconf support long time ago,
but that did not cover much of the above. This can be found at:

<https://git.hadrons.org/cgit/debian/dpkg/dpkg.git/log/?h=ext/sean-debconf-prompt>

I'm wondering though, whether you might be able to use dpkg's
--status-fd (which can be specified multiple times, even if apt passes
its own), where you'd get the prompt stuff via a structured output
that you could parse instead? This would have the advantage of being
readily usable right away.

Thanks,
Guillem

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)